When Ruth Wooderson came on Corey-osity Unleashed with Deb and me, she named two masks women in leadership get handed.
The ice queen. Or the giggle box.
Then she said she refuses to wear either one.
I wrote both names down and underlined them. I've worked in tech my whole career. I've watched both masks on real people in real meetings. I never had a name for them until Ruth gave me one.
Two masks, one trap
The ice queen is the woman who decided to be taken seriously. She speaks in short sentences. She doesn't smile in meetings. She pushes back hard on a bad plan. People call her "cold," "abrasive," "difficult to work with." Nobody calls her a pushover.
The giggle box went the other way. She keeps the room warm. She laughs off the interruption. She softens every "no" until it sounds like "let me get back to you." People call her "lovely" and "great with people." Nobody puts her name forward for the big job.
Here's the part I missed for years. Neither mask is a free choice. Each one is a defense against the other one's penalty. Be warm and you lose competence points. Be firm and you lose likability points. Pick a mask and you pay for the one you didn't pick.
The research names it too
Ruth's two masks line up with research going back decades.
Catalyst analyzed survey answers and interviews for a report called The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership. The subtitle: "Damned if you do, doomed if you don't." The report found three predicaments. People see women as too soft or too tough, never right. They face higher standards and lower rewards. And people see them as competent or liked, rarely both.
Too soft or too tough. Giggle box or ice queen. Same thing, different vocabulary.
Madeline Heilman and her colleagues ran three experiments with 242 participants. When a woman succeeded in a job seen as "male," people liked her less and derogated her more than an equally successful man. Worse, the dislike fed into her evaluations and reward recommendations. Her success cost her.
Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick found the same pattern in hiring. In their 2001 study, an assertive female candidate lost out because people judged her "insufficiently nice." Women who balanced assertiveness with warmth avoided the penalty. So the advice to women becomes: be strong, but soften it. Which is a mask.
Warmth doesn't save you either
You might think the giggle box is the safe bet. It isn't.
Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick studied what happens when working women become mothers. Their paper has a brilliant title: When Professionals Become Mothers, Warmth Doesn't Cut the Ice. Mothers gained warmth in people's eyes and lost competence. Fathers gained warmth and kept their competence. And competence ratings, not warmth, predicted who people wanted to hire, promote and train.
Warmth earns you affection. Competence earns you the job. Women get told to pick one.
I'm not sure about this part: several of these studies used college students as evaluators, not working managers. I'd like to see more studies inside real companies. The Catalyst report drew on survey answers and interviews from working people, and it found the same bind, so I don't think the student samples explain it away.
My mask was optional
I wrote a while back about the mask I wore as a young leader. Calm voice. Confident answers. Never let them see you sweat.
When I finally took it off and told my team "I don't have a plan," it worked. People leaned in. Nobody called me weak. Nobody called me emotional.
Ruth's point made me see how lucky I was. My mask was a choice. I put it on, I took it off, and I got credit for taking it off. A woman doing the same thing in the same room has no guarantee of the same reaction.
Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann tested exactly this with anger. In their three studies of anger at work, men who expressed anger at work got more status. Women who expressed anger got less... whether they were a trainee or a CEO. People read a man's anger as a reaction to circumstances. They read a woman's anger as her personality. "She is an angry person."
I've lost my temper in a meeting. People said I was passionate about the product. I doubt a female colleague would have heard the same word.
Refusing both masks
Ruth's answer is to refuse both. Be herself. Be firm when the plan is bad and warm when the person is struggling, and let both be true at once.
I admire it. I also know refusing costs more for some people than others. Telling a woman to "be authentic" puts the whole burden on her. The masks exist because the people around her hand them out.
Which means the rest of us have work to do. Especially those of us who never got handed a mask in the first place.
What I do differently now
None of this needs a training program. It needs attention.
Swap the name. Before I describe a colleague as "abrasive" or "a bit much," I swap in a man's name and reread the sentence. If I wouldn't write it about him, I don't write it about her.
Judge the work, not the temperature. In reviews I ask what she delivered. Did the project ship? Did the team grow? How warm she seemed in the hallway is not a performance measure.
Give the context out loud. Brescoll and Uhlmann found something useful. When evaluators got an external reason for the woman's anger, the bias went away. So when a female colleague pushes back hard, I say why in the room. "She's right to be frustrated, the vendor missed three deadlines." It sounds small. One study isn't proof, but it costs you nothing to try.
Notice who gets the warm jobs. Who takes the notes? Who organizes the leaving drinks? If the "lovely" women on your team carry all the office chores, you've built a giggle box factory. I wrote more about the promotion side of this in The Glass Ceiling Didn't Break. It Got Frosted.
Let her be both. The goal is a leader allowed to be firm and kind on the same day without anyone filing her under a label. I spent years thinking being real beat being liked. For a lot of women, being real gets read as one mask or the other. Your job is to stop doing the reading.
The question to sit with
Think of the women you've worked with. Which ones did you file as the ice queen? Which ones as the giggle box?
Now ask whether you ever filed a man under either label.
If the answer is no, the masks didn't come from them. They came from you. And you're the one who gets to stop handing them out.